Research Methodology

How to Measure the Impact of a Research

School Of interdisciplinary Engineering & Sciences (SINES) National

University of Sciences and Technology (NUST)
Sector H-12, Islamabad, Pakistan
Impact Factor
-It is a measure of citations to recent articles of a journals.

2014 impact factor = A/B

A = number of citations in 2015: of the articles published in this journal in 2014

and 2013

B = Total number of citable publications in that journal in 2014 and 2013.

Impact Factor
-Journals with higher impact factor are considered more important.

-New England Journal of Medicine: 55.873

-Nature: 41.456

-Science: 33.6

-Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA: 9.674

-Computational Biology and Chemistry: 1.551

Impact factors are calculated for journals included in Journal Citation Reports.

ISI Web of Science

 h-index
-The h-index is a measure of the productivity and citation impact of a scientist.
N- no of papers cited ‘n’ of times then n is your h Index.
-It is extracted from a plot of a scientist’s number of cited papers and number of
citations.
h-index
publications citations
1 10
12
1,10
10
2 8
3 5 8
2,8
4 4
Citations

5 3
6 4,4
4
3,5
2

0
5,3
0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5
Publications
h-index = 4
 h-index
An author has 8 papers that have been cited 33, 30, 20, 15, 7, 6, 5 and 4 times.

This tells us that the author's h-index is 6.

What does an h-index of 6 mean?

•An h-index of 6 means that this author has
published at least 6 papers that have each
received at least 6 citations.

•The first paper has been cited 33 times, and gives us a 1 (there is one paper that has been cited at
least once).

•The second paper has been cited 30 times, and gives us a 2 (there are two papers that have been cited
at least twice).

•The third paper gives us a 3 and all the way up to 6 with the sixth highest paper.

•The final two papers have no effect in this case as they have been cited less than six times
h-index
-The h-index can be calculated manually.
-citation databases (e.g., google scholar, scopus, web of knowledge) also list
h-index
-Each database has a slightly different h-index (because of different coverage).
- Web of Knowledge
- strong coverage of journal articles,
- Week coverage of conference publications
- Scopus
- Good covergae of conference publications
- Week coverage of publications before 1996
- Google Scholar
- Best coverage of conferences and journals (after 1990)